Play It Again

"The Piano Teacher."

Professor Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), who gives piano lessons to advanced students at the Vienna Conservatory, stands at the window of her studio and hurls thunderbolts at the teen-age musicians. When a talented boy hits a clinker, she says, "A wrong note in Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation," which, she implies, is his real crime. Erika, who is both the heroine and the villain of Michael Haneke's audaciously brilliant "The Piano Teacher," has a masklike face and an air of indefinable hauteur. Again and again, she tells her students that they are spiritually inadequate, and though they may tremble and weep, they do not protest. It never occurs to anyone at the conservatory that Erika might be trying to destroy, not nurture, the young musicians. After all, harsh dismissal is an accepted style in Viennese music circles—Mahler himself, perhaps the most nakedly emotional of all composers, was often coldly sarcastic in person. Great music lives at the intersection of mathematics and spiritual exaltation, and Erika, who plays well and has keen insights into her favorites, Schubert and Schumann, always clothes her nastiness in the appropriate colors.

High-minded and rigorous, she has sacrificed everything for her work. She lives in an apartment with her hysterically possessive mother (Annie Girardot); the two of them take turns bullying and even slapping each other, only to fall asleep in the same bed like exhausted lovers. When a possible actual lover appears, an insolently charming student named Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), Erika fends him off with insults. But Walter, strong and quick, and as handsome as an Olympic skier, is not to be deterred, and after a few bristling exchanges he imagines himself in love with Erika. Walter has the sexual vanity of a young conqueror: he thinks he's going to melt the iron maiden with tenderness. But tenderness is the last thing Erika wants. She manipulates and torments Walter, trying to turn him into a lover who will humiliate her according to her own atrocious fantasies.

"The Piano Teacher," which is based on a boiling 1983 novel by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, is about sadomasochism as an implacable human destiny. Those of us who love the movie will insist on the humanity of the portrait: Erika may be a nut straight out of the clinical literature, but she's also a remarkable dramatic creation—an appalling but plausible human being brought to life by one of the world's bravest actresses. "The Piano Teacher," which won the top prizes at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is a genuinely shocking work, and I sense from preliminary conversations that I'm going to have trouble convincing more than a few people that some of it is also very funny. At first glance, Michael Haneke is an entirely serious fellow. A widely produced German playwright, he began making feature films in 1989, at the age of forty-seven, and now works with French actors (he directed the piercing "Code Unknown," with Juliette Binoche, which played here last fall). Haneke is certainly not playful and naughty like Luis Buñuel, whose lyrical 1967 masterpiece, "Belle de Jour," revealed the fantasies and part-time bordello life of an outwardly proper bourgeoise—a movie that is the obvious reference point for "The Piano Teacher." This film, by contrast, offers a realistic representation of a disturbed personality, set in the solemn cultural center of great music and psychoanalytic theory. Yet the wit is there, beneath the surface, mischievously linking the outer world of Erika's accomplishment and the inner world of her destructive hatreds. Haneke's attitude is one of malicious curiosity fringed with respect. Erika is a monster, but we're not meant to pity her or dismiss her as pathetic.

Now and then, after class, Erika sneaks off to a posh video-porn parlor and watches the action in a little booth, or she wanders around a drive-in theatre and spies on couples making love. Eagerly, she draws ever closer to the abyss of exposure and disgrace. "The Piano Teacher" is a dance of self-annihilation: Erika has no interest in pleasure or release. The excitement she feels, in both its sadistic and its masochistic forms, is almost completely mental. She tells Walter that Schumann's Fantasy in C Major conveys a sense of losing one's reason (Schumann struggled with madness in the years after composing it); she would like to think that she can experience that state herself. Absolute control of art and of madness is her sole desire and her sole vanity. But messy life keeps breaking up the rigid mental rituals. In the scene that is the hardest to watch, Erika sits on the edge of the tub at home and cuts herself in a private place with a razor. We may think, Why are we being subjected to this? But in the middle of the scene Erika's mother calls her to dinner. The scary grandeur of Erika's self-purifying rite gives way to the daily banality of getting along with Mom, and the effect is irresistibly comical.

Haneke's camera moves with Erika in her prowls around Vienna, but often it remains still, perched above a piano and looking straight down at hands playing on the keyboard; or it holds Huppert's face in closeup as she thinks pure and dirty thoughts. Haneke avoids the sensationalism of movie shockers, even high-class shockers like Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Polanski's "Repulsion." There are no expressionist moments in "The Piano Teacher"—no scenes of longing, no soft-focus dreams or cinematic dreck. Haneke's frame is clear, lucid, and calm, and he is working with an actress who can draw fury out of extreme elegance and self-containment. Huppert's thin eyebrows are arched down, matching the downward curve of her mouth, and her reddish-brown hair is pinned tightly around her head. She seems as composed and symmetrical as a figure in an Old Master painting. Much of her best acting is no more than a flicker of consciousness, barely visible around the edges of the mask. Yet she gives a classic account of repression and sexual hypocrisy, unleashing the kind of rage that the great Bette Davis might have expressed in an old Warner Bros. melodrama like "The Letter," if only she had been working in an unfettered climate.

My guess is that Haneke's long experience in the theatre has shaped his idea of characterization as a form of armor for warfare. Each of Huppert's scenes with Annie Girardot, for instance, turns into a power struggle fraught with hints of incest and abuse, and Erika's flirtations with Walter might have been scripted by a Strindberg with a flair for musical banter. "Disdaining Bruckner is immature," she says to him—which is true but is not a line I ever expected to hear in a movie, even a movie set in musical Vienna. The intellectual patter (all quite authentic) rattles across the field like Napoleonic musketfire. At first, Erika tries to use her powers as a teacher to dominate Walter. Benoît Magimel has bow lips, a cleft chin, and a springing step—good looks enhanced by high spirits—and initially he just grins and rolls with the punches. The two have a long encounter in the conservatory's bathroom which may be the strangest sex scene in the history of the movies—it's a stop-and-go business in which they both fight for dominance. In the weeks that follow, Erika exasperates her young lover, but he retaliates: Walter acts not according to the instructions he receives but with the commonplace violence of an angry man asserting his superior strength, and Erika, disobeyed, is bereft.

"Schubert's dynamics range from scream to whisper, not loud to soft," Erika says to Walter, and that's her dynamic range, too. I trust that music-lovers will not accuse Haneke of dragging Bach, Schubert, and Brahms (all heard at length) through the mud. The Schubert songs, with their delicate fervency, their sense of foreboding, offer a taste of the irrational, even a longing for it, within the frame of art. Like Schubert's music, the movie addresses the deepest feelings, where eros and murderous rages can easily mingle with transcendent exultation. Yet the music floats free from Erika's perversity—it's the healthy part of her fanaticism. She's both a debased person and a heroine of art. And "The Piano Teacher," which combines Viennese erotic obsessions with French and German film classicism, is heroic, too. But now the movie faces American innocence and literal-mindedness, which could consign it to oblivion. "The Piano Teacher" is a seriously scandalous work, beautifully made, and it deserves a sizable audience that might argue over it, appreciate it—even hate it. Professor Erika Kohut may have shameful secrets, but abandoning her story to an empty closet would be a greater disgrace. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 1, 2002, issue.

David Denby has been a staff writer and a film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.

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